


True

by Jenett



Series: Hufflepuff Virtues [3]
Category: Alternity - A Harry Potter Alternate Universe, Harry Potter Alternity - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Harry Potter - Alternity, Hufflepuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 15:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4791713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenett/pseuds/Jenett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written as background fic for the <a href="http://hpalternity.com">Harry Potter Alternity project</a>.</p>
<p>Part of three stories exploring internal character thoughts for Aurora Sinistra during Year 4, thematically centered on three Hufflepuff virtues, as she tries to figure out what the implications of her relationship with Rabastan Lestrange (Raz) and the circles he moves in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	True

**Author's Note:**

> The specific larger events mentioned are part of Alternity’s canon and discussed with the other relevant players, but her reactions and opinions are decidedly hers and not necessarily canon for the universe.

**May 20th 1995 : The Astronomy Tower, late at night : Hogwarts**

_Love accompanies chaos, precedes the world, wakens the sleeping, lights the dark, gives life to the dead, gives form to the formless, perfects the imperfect._  
Marsilio Ficino : De Amore (commentary on Plato’s Symposium) 

Perspective is everything. 

She feels like there’s a parade of words, all of them with four letters, woven through her life. She leans, back against the wall of the tower, looking up, letting the blanket of stars soothe her while she thinks. 

Fair. Just. True. 

They have been the pillars of her world since her earliest years. What else, in a family of Hufflepuffs, where the colors of her childhood were not the white and black of mercy and severity in the old magical traditions, but the gold of the sun’s height and the black of rich soil. Those two with the sett the space between them shaped everything in her childhood. 

There are the lessons of her early years. 

In the beginning, to be fair was simple. Share your toys, share the chores. Pick up your things, don’t squabble with Diane, watch your sisters. 

But her parents, too, showed fairness. Finding ways to make honour each child’s interests, give them space to grow. Getting her a telescope, and making sure she had the time to explore and time to sleep in after a night of stargazing. The trips each of them was taken on, the summer they turned 15. (To Europe until the wards closed, then somewhere special.) The fairness of a waiting ear, a favourite meal on a birthday, a chance to spend time with a loved aunt or uncle on their own. 

True and just are far more complicated, and came later, but she learned them as well. 

True, for them, means knowing yourself, your place in the world. True is keeping commitments, not dropping them when things became hard. True is not letting your own whims or passions get in the way of what’s proven and demonstrated. 

Just is acting for what’s right, what’s needful. What makes the world more whole rather than more broken. Just is why she’s kept trying to talk to Diane, and why Diane’s tried to talk to her, over and over again, through all the years when they grated. And why, when there was need, they were there for each other. And always would be, she thinks. Knows.

It is harder as an adult.

She knows that being fair, being just, is different now. Whether it’s calling on students in class, or choosing counsellors for the YPL, or selecting candidates for the CCF, fair and just are changed. 

In a just world, she could reward the creative and the skilled, the burning stars in their class, without regard to family or blood. In a just world, she would not fear that a single word might undermine what she seeks. In a just world, she would have some recourse besides silence against Stint and all the others like him, who see her as a stepping stone to their own lust for power and privilege. 

So, if the world is not just, and the world is not true, and the world is not fair, where does that leave her? 

There’s the other four letter words. 

Evil. Good. Fear. Hope.

Her parents, much as she loves them, have not given her a compass for these words, the way they did for being fair, being just, being true. They’ve trusted that moving forward, being fair, being solid - faithful yeomen - will see them safely through. 

It did, in the early 80s. Death touched her family lightly then, in all the upheaval. They avoided the worst of the politics and purges. Her father kept his job. Her mother found one. Her siblings are well-set, married or comfortably not. 

They had done no harm, she knows that. But they also had not helped. 

Harm. Help. More complicated words. 

It did keep them safe. And there is power in that. 

But safe does not show her a way forward either. Safe would be keeping her head down, keeping to her work, doing it well, doing what is expected, and the way it is wanted. And no more. 

Love is also a four letter word. And love changes everything for her. 

And so, she’s found herself this month coming back to Ficino’s long treatise, superficially about Plato, but really about what makes there be Good in the world, and what Love brings to it. 

And she’s thinking about that long afternoon conversation with Narcissa, the two of them feeling one another out, person to person. About what moving in those circles - with all their harm and hurt and fear and evil - might well mean. They have been careful, Raz has been careful, not to force her too close to it. But she is not stupid, and she is not foolish, and she’s begun to find the spaces between what is said. 

This week, she thinks more of it. This span of days already has people on edge - the anniversary of Regulus’ death, two years ago, and the upcoming anniversary of Hannah’s, of Raz’s deep injury. 

When Raz asked to come and talk, she had no idea what to expect, though the glimpses they’d had during the week had suggested he was turning something over and over in his mind. And through that complicated, tangled conversation, she did the best she could to be a light in the dark. To give space and solace. To find what helped, not hurt.

And yesterday, she knows she told him the truth. She might rue his foolishness privately, but blaming him now for something fifteen years gone seems pointless. (And if she were going to do that, having a child is not the thing she’d pick.) 

Her reading this month has brought her to new ideas of how to live a life that is fair and just and true. Fairness is listening. Not judging in advance of the facts. Seeing things in perspective. Justice is not blaming the wrong people. And not letting him blame himself, until more is known. Encouraging him to seek the information that will set more than one heart at ease, whatever the answer is. 

And truth? Truth is looking at what is there, not the ghosts and dreams and boggarts. What is. What might become. 

What’s true? 

She loves Raz. And after that horrible night in April, when she was convinced he was near breaking things off with her, she is more sure of that than ever. This week brings it back to her, those days with him silent and waxen in the infirmary when she was barely admitting to herself how much she’d come to care for him. The knowing comments of his friends and family. How much has changed in a year. 

She needs some solution to the YPL. Much as she fears what might come of it in someone else’s hands, she knows her strength for battle after battle is failing. She wants to build, not conquer, and the higher she moves in political circles, the more she knows how ill-suited she is to that stress, and how right he is. She still hopes for some solution she can live with, over the summer, but whatever the outcome, she knows she needs to stop grasping. 

She needs more balance. This night, this evening, up doing proper research for what feels like the first time in weeks is a step. The night away, next week, is another. As much as work soothes and calms her, as much as it’s how she finds her worth, she knows that play and pleasure must be in there somewhere as well. 

She must find - if she and Raz are to go forward together - more ways to work in comfort in the world he knows best. His compliment, yesterday, surprised her, and yet, it came out of the very real experience she always had. It gives her hope, that perhaps trusting her instincts will not get her so far wrong. Still, it’s clear this summer will require more delicate attention to social concerns than she’d choose - and yet, if it solidifies the chance of their love, that price is fine. 

There are other truths she does not know yet. How to go forward, smiling and pleasant, in a world sometimes filled with horrors. How to find the spaces where she can offer alternatives and hope amidst the dangers. How to still feel like her, able to look herself in the mirror at the end of the day. 

And so, she sits, looking up at the stars and thinking. Knowing that they are, from where she sits, points of light in a far distant place. They form patterns because of where she is. And yet, the truth is that they are vast burning balls of gas and matter, shaping and changing the planets around them, moving and swirling and living and dying. 

She can work only from where she can stand, and what she can reach. But perhaps that is enough.


End file.
